This article retrieves the life and cultural contributions to Britain of Trinidadian Pearl Prescod, singer, campaigner and the first Black female actor at the National Theatre. She is one of a generation of artists, performers, singers and intellectuals whose contribution to the creation of a Black and anti-colonial strand in British culture in the 1950s and ‘60s has been neglected. By tracking her life from her colonial origins through her migration to Britain and struggles to find work in the 1950s, to her brief break-out professional success in the 1960s and early death in 1966, she is pulled from the historical margins. Her life story, which touches on movements of so many hues – Negritude, Pan-Africanism, Black Power, Communism, campaigns for colonial freedom, the March on Washington, the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination − reveals the strong community connections and internationalism of the time. Pearl, the piece argues, was typical of a whole overlooked ‘West Indian generation’ (of educated and politically militant artists, writers, dramatists and actors) whose anti-colonial consciousness and creative activities challenge the popular accepted narrative of an undifferentiated ‘Windrush generation’. The piece contains an account of witnessing Pearl and her fellow actors perform at the National Theatre.
129 targeted violence, expressed surprise 'when people ask me why refugees are coming to the UK. Hasn't Iraq been occupied by Britain and the US?' she said. 'I want people to see the connection.' Caesar, too, was angry at the EU's refusal of responsibility for refugees after military interventions in Mali and Libya, and disgusted at the institutional response to the shipwrecks in April 2015 which claimed over a thousand lives, when the EU declared it would focus on combating the traffickers by destroying their boats and blocking migration routes through Africa. He fumed at media disinformation about Africa, portrayed as sick, needy and backward. His cousin Boubacar also felt the injustice of their treatment: 'We remember the past: slavery; they started the world wars and we fought for them.' In the last section, Trilling tells the story of his own grandmother, Teresa, twice a refugee-first from Russia and then, as a Jew, from Germany, and reminds us of those who did not escape. He does not just want to tell stories, though. He demands that we recognise not only the humanity of those he has encountered, but also the racism which governs their lives, which makes their travel so fraught with danger, which renders them unwanted and their needs of no account. And he calls on us to act, to protest, to resist the betrayal of the founding values of the EU their treatment represents. Institute of Race Relations FRANCES WEBBER Voices from the 'Jungle': stories from the Calais refugee camp Edited by MARIE GODIN et al. (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 266 pp. £14.99.
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